lower now and lower still

Title: A Thousand Ways to HellAuthor: Me (glittergron)Pairings/Characters: Santana/Brittany, Rachel/Quinn, Burt Hummell, Kurt, Mercedes, Sue.Rating: NC-17.Type: AU, angst, crossover.Summary: Two sisters, raised by their father to fight supernatural evil, search for a way to save each other and the people they love from a dark destiny.Spoilers: None for Glee, pre-series through to season 4 for Supernatural.A/N: I couldn't possibly kill Quinn, so I created an original character to fill the role of Jess in this story. Besides, I have other plans for our favourite blonde HBIC.

When Rachel was a little girl she used to have nightmares that roused her from sleep with screams and tears. Santana would always be right by her side within moments, so close and reaching out with comforting hands, but when those little child's sobs broke the air in the middle of the night it never stopped terrifying Santana. She was hardly any older, but she bent to shoulder Rachel's burdens as best she could.

The nightmares had gradually stopped the older Rachel got. Or maybe she got better at hiding them, pretending she was perfectly normal. It was a hard thing to do when people wanted to pry into their lives, cut them open and dissect them like dead frogs. Going into high school Rachel wasn't thinking much about other people. Santana thought about them a lot, and started to devise ways to avoid interaction and parry irritating questions.

Every new school they went to was the same. Where are you from? You're sisters? How'd your mum die? Santana would typically meet the curiosity with glares and weighted silences, and Rachel was so distracted by singing and performing that she barely took any notice of the whispers.

It never helped that their dad was always in hunting mode. When once he'd been a good-looking Hispanic man, his black hair had grown long enough to be shaggy and the streaks of silver were a lot more obvious now. Adrian Lopez once had impeccable taste, a closet bursting with Italian-made silk suits, but he'd slid into a self-destructive state of mind where nothing quite mattered anymore. Least of all his appearance; he wore ratty jeans and scuffed shoes which had once been polished and attractive. The muscle had shed off him after years of stress and his shirts all hung off his thin frame.

He was persistent and asked questions of townspeople, strange and intrusive ones that started rumors about the man being unhinged. Which his girls paid the price for.

Santana had been protecting her sister from other people ever since. She learned how to be harsh and brutal with the nosey girls who tried to put them down, she was quick to turn away the acne-scarred boys who thought because they were damaged they might be easy. Rachel was happy, and Santana was happy about that.

And then Stanford happened, and suddenly Rachel could be happy somewhere Santana couldn't follow. Of course she insisted her sister follow her dreams, her heart, the yearning of her soul to be someone. But to actually see her go had been a new experience. She'd been convinced they could never be apart, but it was just her who felt that way. Rachel was destined for greatness, and she couldn't find it in dank motel rooms.

To be back in her sister's life was overwhelming for Santana, and she felt needed again. Their father had never been able to calm Rachel fully when she was in the midst of a nightmare, the claws of some awful dream sunk deep into her mind. It was Santana who took her hand and led her safely back into the world of the waking.

Now, not long after Rachel's twenty-third birthday and Santana's twenty-fourth, they were brought back together by those same old terrors.

"What do you mean, Rach?" Santana asked hesitantly. Please let everything be okay, just a false alarm, god let this just be Rachel being a drama queen. "What dreams?"

"Bad ones," Rachel answered, a pained frown crossing her face as though remembering was slicing her open. Her eyes skittered to the doorway, to the dark hallway. Santana waited for her sister to continue; she had more fears and theories than she could handle swirling up in her mind, taking her common sense on a ride down a very dark tunnel. "I'm dating this girl. Abby. She's meant to be separate to everything else in my life, San. But I've been dreaming about her, about her d-dying. And I- I just don't know what to do."

Santana swallowed her heart, which had gone swinging into her throat at the way Rachel's face lit up talking about her girlfriend, then crumpled like burning paper because she was so terrified of her dreams and what they meant. If they were just nightmares, it would be okay. It would be all in her head, but Rachel always had an uncanny knack for knowing things. About people, about places. And her nightmares had taken a turn for the prophetic many times; when they were kids and something would happen, Rachel would sometimes turn to Santana and whisper, "I dreamt about that, S."

And Santana had always believed her, because there was never any artifice in her eyes. She wasn't acting or playing pretend, and the scared way she'd reach out for Santana's hand and clutch it like it was her only lifeline had shown her that her brave Rachel was frightened.

Santana was out of her chair the moment the sadness and gravity of her dreams fell onto Rachel's face like an anvil, rolling out of nowhere and landing so hard that her expression was transformed into something new. Into that of a girl who couldn't possibly hold her head above the tide. So Santana crossed the room in fucking leaps and bounds to be beside Rachel, tugging her into a hug that filled them both up with warmth.

They were each other's safe places. Rachel curled into the hug, fingers clutching at the lapels of Santana's jacket as she let herself collapse into her sister's lap. Since coming to Stanford, her life had been like a fairytale. She'd found a place she never wanted to leave, and she'd fallen for a beautiful girl who made her heart swell.

It was unfair that who she really was got in the way of everything she wanted; the tangles of her past still caught around her ankles and dragged her back. And while Santana had always been the pillar of strength, Rachel was the wavering light of optimism that kept them all smiling. She would sing to cheer her father up, when nothing else in the world could possibly do that, and even though hunting was a part of her life she refused to let it take her over.

Rachel had never wanted to be like her father, or her sister, living in a world where the mother she'd hardly known was a ghost who held their leashes with cold fingers and kept them in a world without life. The youngest Lopez was the courageous one, the one who looked behind the curtain and learned that moving on was never a betrayal. Her mother practically told her so, in her dreams when she came to spread the darkness with her bright hands.

Leaving for Stanford, Rachel had been so hopeful. She joined several drama clubs and attended inspiring classes taught by guest lecturers – people who were scarred by their own hopes. She hadn't had a nightmare in months and she was starting to believe they'd stopped; she met a girl named Abby in her theatre group and felt a crush build up in the smiles and looks they shared.

Moving in together had seemed to be the right thing to do, the natural fit for both of them. Rachel was a diva and demanding of attention, and Abby was happy to give her what she wanted. Abby was one of those girls who could bring hope to people, who could make someone forget the dark things in their hearts and in their minds. Rachel fell in love.

When the dream started, Rachel had dismissed it. It was the brief sound of a scream being swamped and smothered by the roar of a fire that burned the nightmare to a blackened husk. When she woke she had the lingering scent of smoke catching in her throat, a phantom that made her punch and kick out to fight away the sheer possibility.

Abby would calm her down with surprised yet gentle words, trying to pin the smaller girl's arms and legs still but she'd have to ride the panic instead. It was a one-off for Rachel, or at least she desperately wished it was. Three days later the nightmare came back, grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to watch through a flickering screen as her girlfriend padded into the bedroom with a smile on her face. The smell of baking filling the apartment with the kind of homey comfort Rachel had never experienced before college.

The nightmare had hummed and shook like a burning film reel in Rachel's mind, sluggish as she watched from the sidelines. The tall figure had appeared, cloaked in darkness, and twisted his hands in Abby's direction. Abby's body jerked sideways like a ragdoll, arms and legs flailing in shock and a breathless scream being torn from her mouth.

Rachel had tried to force herself to wake before the sound of blood dripping on the carpet started, before the rush of flames sucking at oxygen felt hot against her cheeks, even in her dream. She tried to force herself not to believe it, but the dream continued for many nights until her shaking fingers had tapped across the keypad of her phone to dial a number that she used to recite at night in order to lock it in her memory.

She'd called Santana with her heart in her throat and had uttered a short message to her answering machine, knowing Santana would come when she tossed the word emergency out for her to hear. Her sister could never deny Rachel help, not for the small things and especially not for the things that mattered. The moment she ended the call, Rachel was certain Santana would be there and she hadn't been proved wrong.

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"Start from the beginning…" Santana murmured, the fingers of her right hand gently coasting through Rachel's hair, twisting around soft curls and reminding Rachel why she'd needed her sister there. "What happens in your dreams?"

"Abby- there's someone in the apartment," Rachel said quietly, her voice low and scared like a child's. "Abby's here alone, and someone appears in the bedroom. Behind her. She doesn't notice them until… until she's in the air."

"In the air?" Santana prompted when Rachel trailed off into an uneasy silence.

"Like invisible hands," Rachel continued, shaking herself from her thoughts. "I think it must be a demon, but I'm not sure. There are other monsters with the power of telekinesis, aren't there?" Santana gave a short nod but didn't commit any more to the idea. "And… it kills her. It kills Abby, San. It hurts her and there's a fire and- and what if it's real? I love her, I can't let her die like that. I can't let her die at all!"

"Shh," Santana hummed gently, holding onto her horrified sister. "Calm down, Rach. It could just be a dream, nothing more. We don't know for sure."

"But I do know," Rachel said, shaking her head. "I can feel it. It's one of those dreams, San. They've never truly stopped, only gotten worse, and more frequent. I can feel it in my gut that this is just like the others. Remember when I dreamt about that girl in our class, in grade school? Rosie, the one who went missing. I always knew what happened to her and you believed me without question." Rachel tilted her head up to look at her sister, communicating the terror in her eyes. "Believe me now, San. Help me stop this dream from coming true."